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ISSN 0973-2136
Volume V, Issue 2, February 2009 THE MONTHLY MAGAZINE ON POSITIONING, NAVIGATION AND BEYOND
2. Why N-RTK is needed for this augmentation (see also the C-HALO papers on
Scribd) and why it needs the C-HALO planned dedicated, licensed, wide-area secure
wireless stems as its foundation.
The dangers of
GPS/GNSS
February 2009 |
colophon and contents
In this issue
Volume 5, Issue 2, February 2009
Articles
The dangers of GPS/GNSS Börje Forssell 6 Challenges before National Mapping Organisations Vanessa
Lawrence CB, P Nag, Lam Joon Khoi 10 Quality evaluation of NRTK correction transmission Lei Yang, Chris
Hill, Xiaolin Meng and Jose Aponte 14 Accuracy performance of hand-held GPS Abdullah S Alsalman and
Abdullah E Ali 27 Geomatics in Pakistan A W Mir 30
Columns
My Coordinates Editorial 5 News Remote Sensing 32 GPS 34 Galileo update 35 LBS 36 GIS 36 Industry 38
Mark your calendar February 2009 to September 2009 42
This issue has been made possible by the support and good wishes of the following individuals and companies Abdullah E
Ali, Abdullah S Alsalman, A W Mir, Börje Forssell, Chris Hill, Jose Aponte, Lam Joon Khoi, Lei Yang, P Nag, Vanessa Lawrence CB,
Xiaolin Meng and Antrix, Hemisphere GPS, Sanding, Magellan, Navcom, NovAtel, NRSA, Spirent, Javad, Leica, South; and many
others
Mailing Address Coordinates is an initiative of cGIT that aims to broaden the Editor Bal Krishna
11C Pocket A scope of positioning, navigation and related technologies.
SFS Mayur Vihar Phase III cGIT does not neccesarily subscribe to the views expressed Owner Centre for Geoinformation Technologies
Delhi 110 096, India. by the authors and advertisers in this magazine and may not
Phones +91 11 22632607, 98102 33422, 98107 24567 be held liable for any losses caused directly or indirectly due Designed at Thomson Press India Ltd.
Fax +91 11 22632607 to the information provided herein. © cGIT, 2009. Reprinting
with permission is encouraged; contact the editor for details. Printer Thomson Press India Ltd., B 315, Okhla Phase I,
Email New Delhi-110020, India
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for Geoinformation Technologies at A221 Mangal
| February 2009
Web www.mycoordinates.org Apartments, Vasundhara Enclave, Delhi 110096, India.
GNSS
Dept. of Electronics and satellite-based navigation systems. So far, PDOP Availability: Requirement
Telecommunications, the US-built GPS dominates the scene - PDOP of 6 or less, 98% of the
Trondheim, Norway completely, but the Russian GLONASS time or better; Actual - 99.98%.
borje.forssell@iet.ntnu.no is approaching around-the-clock global
operational status, and other systems are Horizontal Service Availability:
being developed (the European Galileo, the Requirement - 95% threshold of
Chinese Compass/Beidou and the Indian 36 metres, 99% of the time or
IRNSS). There are also augmentation better; Actual – 3.7 metres.
systems of more or less operational
status (the US WAAS, the European Vertical Service Availability: Requirement
EGNOS, the Japanese MSAS and the - 95% threshold of 77 metres, 99% of
Indian GAGAN). Satellite navigation the time or better; Actual – 5.3 metres.
is becoming part of everyday life, user
equipments are becoming cheaper, smaller, User Range Error: Requirement
easier to handle and with increasingly - 6 metres or less; Constellation
improved performance. This development Average Actual - 1.2 metres.
is expected to continue for the foreseeable
future with receivers in mobile phones and
cars as dominating markets (Figs. 1-3). What’s the problem?
The following discussion for obvious The problem is that nothing works
reasons mostly refers to GPS, but the 100 %. GPS is very close, but for
[Car navigation already the arguments are generally valid for all some users under some circumstances,
main use, and dominating in global navigation satellite-based systems. “very close” is not good enough. The
commercial wireless devices situation in general is as follows:
also.]
Actual performance • Most GPS users know nothing about
GPS vulnerability.
Today’s average performance of GPS • Most users don’t care.
is used as a starting point for our • Most GPS users can stand some
Fig. 1. GPS users in 2006 interruptions or performance reduction.
Manufacturing • Most politicians and representatives of
7% authorities in the field of navigation
don’t know of GPS vulnerability.
Tracking • Back-up systems are being
10% closed down (e.g. LORAN-C), and
Aviation
Vessel voyage Hand held there is little or no contact between
4%
2% 26% different countries about these matters.
Fig. 4. This dice is a 10 mW GPS jammer. Fig. 5. Example of a car navigation problem.
Coordinates February 2009 | 7
worse than white noise, and narrow- continuously for 4.5 days. There were LORAN) can be very useful in case
band interference is worse than several impacts to ATC operations of satellite signal malfunctioning.
wide-band. during the six days of jamming: Such integration can also be efficient
against interference and jamming.
• Aircraft lost GPS 45 nm from
Recorded examples Phoenix, performed a 35° turn toward Other countermeasures against all kinds
of GPS troubles traffic; of external interference are filtering and
• NOTAM was not issued until 2nd advanced signal processing, including
During the long (and ― don’t forget! ― day; adaptive antennas and null-steering.
usually very successful) history of GPS, • numerous pilots reported loss of GPS;
a number of satellite malfunctions and • There were reports of hand- A question which is often asked is
interference problems have been recorded. held GPS receivers not working. whether upcoming systems (Galileo,
Taking the record of April – August of INRSS, etc.) will solve the problem.
the year 2005 for examples of satellite The answer is that they will reduce the
malfunctions, we find the following: Time users problem but not solve it completely.
correction transmission
The paper investigates the quality variation of the NRTK correction
transmission, and reveals its influence on the positioning solution
G
Lei Yang
NSS positioning/navigation devices between the receiver and a reference
Research Fellow IESSG
are rapidly merging into and station with known high-accuracy
University of Nottingham
changing our modern lives, just like the position, spatially correlated errors can
United Kingdom
personal computer in the 1980’s and the be removed, and positioning accuracy
lei.yang@nottingham.ac.uk
cellular phone in the 1990’s. It is predicted can be improved from tens of meters
that by 2012, the annual shipment of (Stand Alone mode) to centimetre level.
navigation devices will increase to over
65 million units, which is more than three The limitation of traditional RTK is that
Dr Chris J Hill times the 19.8 million shipped in 2006 [1]. some distance-dependent errors (such
Principal Research IESSG Also in a situation personal computer and as ionosphere delay) will increase with
University of Nottingham cellular phone ever faced, a higher standard the increasing length of the baseline
United Kingdom service demand has been placed in front between the rover and the reference
of the GNSS technology, and becoming station. Normally for an implementation
a bottleneck before its potential mass with centimetre-level accuracy
market can be exploited. More precisely, at requirement, the baseline length should
present, real time and high accuracy are the not be more than 20km [2]. For national
Dr Xiaolin Meng two major concerns for many promising GNSS applications, this limitation
Research Councils UK commercial GNSS plans, such as Road would result in a dense reference
Academic Fellow at the IESSG Pricing and Intelligent Transportation station network and considerable
Professor of Wuhan Systems Services (ITSS) [2]. investment in infrastructure.
University and Mapping
For these high demand applications, Real- To overcome this constraint, NRTK
Time Kinematic (RTK) positioning is one was developed in recent years. In a
of the most significant solutions and has NRTK GNSS facility, a central data
been widely tested and commercialized in server collects the raw observations
Jose Aponte
many countries [3-5]. Its latest evolving from a number of reference stations,
PhD student at the IESSG,
trend has been leading in the Network and sends corrections to a rover
the University of Nottingham
RTK (NRTK) direction. NRTK technology positioning terminal after carrying out
can remove spatially correlated errors and an integrated processing. The rover
effectively mitigate distance-dependent then combines these corrections with
errors in the GNSS measurements, and its local carrier phase observations,
achieve a centimetre-level positioning to obtain a high accuracy real time
solution [6]. In such a high accuracy real positioning solution. The architecture
time system, reliable and high-speed of NRTK system is shown in Figure 1.
server-rover communication (i.e. correction
message transmission) plays an important In a NRTK implementation, through
role in the final performance. Our work the interpolation of corrections from a
will investigate the quality variation of the set of reference stations, the distance-
NRTK correction transmission, and reveal dependent errors are mitigated and
its influence on the positioning solution. the high-accuracy solution can be
achieved in a much greater area than a
traditional RTK implementation. The
NRTK background separation between the NRTK reference
Figure 1: Network RTK system architecture
which consists of a network reference stations
stations can be extended to 100km
(left), central processing facility (middle) and In the traditional RTK technology, by [7], which means only 600 stations
the user groups (right) differencing the carrier phase observables could cover the whole European area.
Data dissemination Currently both public Internet and using the setup as shown in Figure 2
GPRS can provide high-quality in a research lab within the Institute of
Much research in NRTK technology has services. However, these services are Engineering Surveying and Space Geodesy
focused on the efficiency and effectiveness not guaranteed. RTK data does not (IESSG) in the University of Nottingham.
of the reference stations measurement have any priority on these channels, The tests were carried out in a static NRTK
usage, through improving models although it is quite time-sensitive. mode with a GNSS antenna fixed on a
(especially for the ionosphere model) and During the transmission, frequent route precisely measured point to minimize
the data processing technique to reduce switching, channel congestion in peak- the influence from irrelevant factors.
the number of stations and cost. When a time and even any faulty from the service
network is getting sparse, the length of data provider’s equipment might cause the The whole system can be separated
communication will extend accordingly. RTK messages to be delayed or lost. into three sections: Data Source, Data
In the meantime, due to the rapid change [As depicted, none of the wireless has all Dissemination Route and Data User. In the
of the satellite geometry and also the needed elements. What is needed wide- data source section, a dedicated RTK GPS
atmospheric conditions, the correction Evaluation System area, dedicated network established jointly by the IESSG
messages from the data server have a mission-critical grade wireless.] and the Leica Geosystems is utilized. This
time-limited validity. Thus the challenge To study the impacts of these transmission network consists of 14 high grade geodetic
for NRTK data dissemination is to keep a variations, parallel tests were conducted GNSS station sites and covers an area of
reliable and high speed wide-bandwidth
service in a long distance transmission. Type of Comm. Radio Cellular Satellite Wi-Fi
The variations during the correction Range short large large very short
data transmission, i.e. message delay Coverage line of sight nearly full full limited
and loss, may increase with the increase
Bandwidth Wide Wide/limited limited Wide
of the baseline and eventually degrade
the high accuracy solution. Therefore IP supporting no yes yes yes
the quality of the RTK correction data Service charge no medium high low
dissemination should be taken seriously. Licensing required [N/A] no no no
reliability dedicated not guaranteed Exclusive not guaranteed
The RTK data transmission channel is service
a combination of cable connection and Table 1: Comparison of Different Correction Dissemination Approaches
wireless connection. In terms of the
cable connection part, public Internet
is the dominating choice. In 2003 an
application-level protocol, Network
Transport of RTCM via Internet Protocol
(NTRIP) was developed by the Federal
Agency for Cartography and Geodesy
(BKG), Germany [8]. It is dedicated to
streaming GNSS data over the Internet.
The data server of a RTK network is both
a TCP/IP server and an NTRIP caster.